4.0 out of 5 stars
An Excellent Range of Voices and Cultures, July 2 2004
This review is from: Charlie Chan Is Dead 2: At Home in the World (An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction--Revised and Updated) (Paperback)
Jessica Hagedorn has put together a mostly impressive collection of short stories and a few novel excerpts written by Asian Americans. From well-known names to lesser known talents, this anthology covers the wide terrain of both stylistic approaches and Asian cultures. Its writers can claim heritages from Vietnam, India, the Philippines, China, Taiwan, Japan, Cambodia, and Korea. Some stories, such as Peter Ho Davies's "The Hull Case," have little, if anything, to do with Asian culture, but most have stronger connections to cultural uniqueness. Sarah Chin's "Red Wall" follows a Chinese-American narrator as she explores the faces of China as the member of a documentary film crew. Bharati Mukherjee, in her well-known and powerful story "The Management of Grief," explores the impact on the Canadian-Indian community of a plane crash in India that kills their loved ones. Ka Vang's "Ms. Pac-Man Ruined My Gang Life" tells of a Hmong member of a girl-gang who is forced by her home-girls to exact revenge on a Puerto Rican girl. Gish Jen's strong "Who's Irish?" is movingly told in broken but lucid English by a Chinese woman who doesn't like the wildness in her half-Irish granddaughter. Some of my favorite writers are included here: Chang-Rae Lee, Ruth Ozeki, Akhil Sharma, Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri, Monique Truong. However, many of these forty-two writers were unknown to me before I read their stories, and I'm grateful Hagedorn introduced me to their work.
While some of these stories fall short of succeeding, all are well-written. The range in voices gives the reader a sense of the variety of the cultures and their individual members. I recommend this for readers of international fiction as well as Asian-Americans who long for writers who speak to their culture. This would make an excellent textbook for high school and college level courses that explore non-Western contemporary literature.
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